This is eighth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Bigg

WARNING: This review contains discussions of eroticized sexual violence, bestiality, and sexualized characters with childlike appearances. Please read at your own discretion.

What if there was an all-babes Suikoden where everyone kept falling ass-over-teakettle into extremely sexual tentacles? The answer to this question is provided by Tsukinomizu Project in the form of their 2023 RPG, Eclipse Knight Saga ~Captive Princess Knight Mary~. This reveals to us the dangers of asking hypothetical questions willy-nilly. In all honesty, Eclipse Knight Saga is not, for the most part, a bad game. In the roughly 20 hours I played, which I’m told only brings me about a third of the way through this game’s total average playtime, I encountered some things I was modestly impressed by and more than a few things I disliked, but most of the time what I encountered was slumped-over, jaw-resting-against-my-fist, capital-B Boredom.

Everything about Eclipse Knight Saga is perfectly competent and serviceable. Its combat functions, and even possesses an identifiable difficulty curve that does demands a certain level of attention and mastery (though only up to a point – more on this later). There exists a mostly-cogent narrative (I say “mostly” because the English translation often leaves something to be desired) and the cast does include a very large number of characters (this is frequently not as much of an asset as the game seems to think it is – more on this later). If you’re in the market for a certain strain of tentacle porn, this game does contain a generous helping thereof. On the other hand, if you find tentacle porn crass and weightless as I do, that huge helping quickly starts to look less like a treat and more like a chore. Yes, you guessed it: more on this later.

All the pieces are there, everything works, and even I’m not so curmudgeonly as to deny the game its flowers for the little flourishes it adds, such as its charming combat sprites and upgradeable home base. By the standards of pornographic video games, this places it in rarefied company. And yet, as you might have gleaned from my many caveats, I would struggle to recommend it to any save a very specific few.

The Setup

Let’s start with laying out some basics. The main character of Eclipse Knight Saga is Mary Milledelard, second princess of the Drakeina Kingdom. Mary is kidnapped during a routine border patrol and spirited away into the upstart kingdom of Mioria so that her magical royal essence can be used to break the divine seals on a malevolent dragon god. During her imprisonment, Mary is fitted with a magical collar that contains a sentient bodysuit made of sexual tentacles – the villains intend to use the suit to break Mary’s will entirely, but Mary comes to an understanding with the suit and escapes her captors. Rather than fleeing Mioria, Mary opts to remain in order to restore the broken seals and thwart the designs of those that imprisoned her, aided on her journey by more than two dozen anime babes who all appear to share the same face.

Said babes are scattered across Mioria like so many Pokemon – some joining your party over the natural course of the story, others requiring a bit more legwork to recruit, all of them extremely Sexual in a sort of distracted, never-fully-committing-to-the-bit kind of way. Every party member also has her own unique mix of battle skills, as well as two distinct “styles” of combat – for example, Mary’s standard combat approach sees her using a mix of axe skills and tentacle-based spells, but she can enter “Suit Purge” mode, during which her magic tentacle suit recedes completely, allowing her to become a much more axe-focused damage dealer. Among the others are a nun who switches from standard-issue clerical spellcasting to glass-cannon magical attacker when she enters her succubus form, a lightning mage who gets the mana cost of her spells sliced in half (as well as a tail & cat ears made of electricity) when she allows herself to be possessed by a lightning spirit, and a fighter who rams into enemies with her big ass when she enters Start Using My Big Ass To Hit Enemies Mode. Sadly, as fun & fanciful as these ideas are in abstract, in practice they merely serve as a mildly-engaging wrapper around a bog-standard RPG Maker turn-based combat system that you’re going to be slogging through all too often.

As with all RPG Maker games, it’s hard for Eclipse Knight Saga to escape the gravity well of how painfully out-of-the-box-RPG-Maker everything feels. Of all the purpose-built game creation engines, RPG Maker often feels like it insists upon itself the most. The standard-issue array of RPG Maker character sprites. The usual clunky RPG Maker menu navigation–why DO all RPGMaker games have menus that are such a chore to navigate, anyway? Aren’t JRPGs, like, MOSTLY menus?

Eclipse Knight Saga even includes the stock RPG Maker sound effects. But don’t you worry: Tsukinomizu Project have made sure to include some truly atrocious custom SFX for their sex scenes. Have you ever thought “this sex scene is good and all, but I really hope its orgasms remind me of someone pouring a big pot of scrambled eggs into a deep fat fryer”. It’s your lucky day! My point is that even if you’re a competent developer making a good game, it’s a lot of work to make a game in RPG Maker that doesn’t make one painfully aware that it was made in RPG Maker. It’s a dinosaur of an engine, with RPG Maker games having appeared on systems from PC-88 all the way up to the PlayStation 4 over the past 33 years, and it sure doesn’t feel like much about it has changed in that time.

The Game

Eclipse Knight Saga does itself no favors with its first impression, a collection of prologue adventures that will take the player several hours to complete and contain very little sexual content (especially compared to the rest of the rest of the game). The prologue narratives have a set pattern: one to three of the recruitable anime babes learns about Mary’s kidnapping and resolves to travel to Mioria in order to aid in her rescue, you play as the babes as they struggle to overcome whatever it might be that’s keeping them from getting into Mioria (tentacle monsters, bandits, dysfunctional church hierarchies, what have you), and then after their mini-adventure wraps up we’re treated to a short interlude that shows what’s happening with Mary during her imprisonment.

In theory, these short adventures ought to serve as engaging introductions to our primary cast and the world they inhabit, giving us a chance to familiarize ourselves with core gameplay concepts in the process. However, Eclipse Knight Saga misses the brief on every conceptual level. For one thing, the exercise is pointless; very few of the recruitable anime babe characters featured in these prologue adventures are important to the story, with most becoming just another face in the waiting room after recruitment, so why did I just spend an hour getting to know them? It’s not just the recruitable anime babes we meet during these adventures either, because of COURSE we need to be introduced to all the relevant characters in each anime babe’s life along the way. The player endures a deluge of new names, new quirks, new locations, over and over and over again, with very little connecting one adventure to another. Without context, this all ultimately blends together into a sublimely forgettable slurry. And forget about any kind of naturalistic exposure to core gameplay concepts: those come at the beginning of the post-prologue gameplay, about six hours in, where Mary walks through a mirror onto a farm map where a dozen different fairies take turns explaining every single mechanical concept one after another. This is, without exaggeration, one of the most interminable introductions to a game I’ve ever experienced.

The bright side is that once you DO start playing as Mary the game becomes the aforementioned bog-standard traverse-the-world, kill-monsters-to-level-up, get-progressively-stronger-equipment, clear-some-sidequests, upgrade-your-base, attain-higher-level-abilities, defeat-the-bosses JRPG, which winds up feeling like a cool breeze across one’s face after the confused misery of the prologue adventures.

Is the gameplay FUN? Not especially – there’s a certain level of strategy to which abilities you use and when you deploy your anime babes’ respective form changes, but I found myself leaning on the “Speed Up Combat” button for a solid 90% of the fighting I did on Normal difficulty. Boss battles are somewhat more engaging, but only just.

Another problem is that despite there being such a wealth of anime babe party members to choose from when composing their five-babe combat party, there’s almost never any mechanical reason to swap anyone out – I kept the same five-babe party (Mary, the nun, some kind of armor girl, some kind of sword girl, and the aforementioned lightning mage) throughout almost my entire playtime and cleared every combat encounter just fine. Characters might occasionally be required from a narrative standpoint on various missions, but if they aren’t included in the party, they’ll still show up to deliver their lines and then depart. Characters aren’t even required to spend time in the party together to activate supports, with the home base’s hot springs providing all the bonding required. Without encounters that require specific skillsets or mechanics that demand certain characters, party rotation is pointless.

Is the story and character writing GOOD? The best I can say about the writing is that most of the time I understood what was going on – I can’t speak to the quality of the writing in the original Japanese, but the English translation is EXTREMELY perfunctory, something that is exemplified in its naming conventions. For example: the world of Eclipse Knight Saga is awash with monsters that fuck anime babes regardless of genus, and those monsters are referred to as “magical touch monsters”. There are also large, extra-dangerous monsters that require great skill to overcome. These are called “big monsters”. Can you discern a trend?

The Porn

Well, how about the porn? Is the porn hot, at least? I’m going to take my time answering this, because my answer (“No”, if you’re curious) is borne both from personal taste and what I believe are defensible violations of pornographic best practices. Let’s start with personal taste – or, as it happens, distaste. From the notes I took as I played:

“It feels like we went from “barely any sexual content” to “sexual caterpillars invert the heroine’s womb” really quickly. Too quickly, some would say.”

Said caterpillars perform said womb-inversion pretty early on in the playing-as-Mary, post-prologue portion of the game. I’d known this to be a ‘creatures fucking women’ game, so it’s not like I was completely unprepared, but this level of graphic intensity so soon still took me aback. Cards on the table: although I enjoy pornography of creatures fucking women in a broad sense (I am myself in the middle of developing a game of a similar bent, after all), I tend to prefer my creatures sentient and communicative, where Eclipse Knight Saga‘s creatures skew mostly non-sentient and more or less mute (if you don’t count the truly atrocious sexual soundscape as ‘communication’).

Approaching things from a more formalist perspective, when you’re making a pornographic game with a visual component, you have a number of options for what to do when it comes time to showcase sex taking place. You could show it as an animation, but bespoke animations are extremely expensive (and they can quickly bloat file size to boot). You could show it as a static illustration, but most sex involves a certain number of stages and movements – how do you choose what to represent in a single image? Budget-minded porno game devs can split the difference and use a series of illustrations to give the IMPRESSION of animation, essentially breaking what WOULD be an animation into a series of keyframes with the in-betweens excised. A bare-bones template for doing so might look like:

• Image 1: We are looking at Person A and Person B on a bed. Person A is lying on their back, Person B is straddling Person A. Both are fully clothed.
• Image 2: Both have now fully disrobed. Importantly, the background, angle, and pose are all identical to Image 1, meaning that the only thing that must be redrawn is the clothing the characters are wearing (or not wearing). Person A’s penis is erect.
• Image 3: Person A’s erect penis has entered Person B’s vagina.
• Image 4: Person A’s erect penis has gone further inside Person B’s vagina.
• Image 5: Person A’s erect penis has been partially-withdrawn from Person B’s vagina. (You can alternate between Image 4 and Image 5 in order to create the illusion of animation).
• Image 6: Person A is cumming inside Person B’s vagina.
• Image 7: Person A’s less-erect penis has been withdrawn, dripping, from Person B’s (also dripping) vagina. Sex scene over! What would have required hundreds of drawings in animated format has been accomplished with merely seven! Congratulations!

Pretty dry, but hopefully you get the picture(s).

Eclipse Knight Saga KIND OF does this…just ineptly. The middle stages are often held in static focus, so that rather than movement being implied, various tentacles and appendages simply look like they’re kind of just hanging out in their respective holes. There are also never any pose changes (at least not in the two dozen or so scenes I saw), which starts to give the scenes a certain wooden quality when you realize nobody is ever going to move from the position in which they initially appear.

The sex scenes also suffer from a problem of context, or lack thereof. In static illustrations, there are a lot of tricks you can use to sell the force and intensity of what’s happening in a sex scene, and Eclipse Knight Saga employs almost none of them. As mentioned, the anime babes getting fucked never seem to change position between the start and end of a sex scene, which means the opportunity to show them going from “demurely supine” to “obscenely spread-eagled” is squandered. The anime babes also suffer from a plastic stiffness throughout most of their bodies, too – we rarely see ass cheeks rippling mid-thrust, breasts squishing as fingers sink into them, or lips deforming around some manner of cock-like fleshy outcropping (lips are conspicuously absent in much of Eclipse Knight Saga). Then there’s the tentacles themselves – much of the time we don’t have a good look at the organism they originate from, with the things wandering in from offscreen or from behind various body parts, meaning the viewer is often robbed a sense of the presence of the creatures the anime babes are sharing their scenes with. These crimes are even repeated when the anime babes are being fucked by humanoid creatures; during a goblin gangbang I found myself taking the note “that is the stupidest penis I have ever seen”. It looked like a green macaroni noodle curving in from parts unknown, totally divorced from any kind of masculine goblinoid’s lower torso.

The Rough Stuff

And then we come to the subject of squicks, of which there are three of note: the frequency of rape as impetus for sex scenes, sexualized characters of indeterminate age with extremely prepubescent looks, and the frequently-animalistic sex creatures. Working backwards, the creatures are very much a “your mileage may vary” situation for me. Bugs, invertebrates, and the like just don’t do it for me – I like when my fuckable creatures have at least SOME level of relatable intelligence and motivations beyond “an instinctual urge to fuck various girl holes”. That kind of thing can be hot in small doses, but when it makes up something like 90% of your game’s sexual content, eventually all I can do is yawn.

As far as the uncomfortably-child-adjacent fuckable anime babes go (and there are several, yippee!) all I can say is that obviously I know what we’re doing here. This is a loophole probably as old as pornography itself: despite their tiny frames, flat chests, and hairless pudenda (to be fair, none of the definitely-adult anime babes have any body hair whatsoever), these childlike anime babes are never assigned a definite age and otherwise behave in an adult manner, so who’s to say they AREN’T perfectly legal? Politically, the past decade or so has shaped me into something of a free speech maximalist as far as pornography goes; I support the right of anyone to create any kind of depiction of eroticism provided no real humans were harmed in the process of creation, even when those depictions are of distasteful or taboo subject matter. But holy fuck is this kind of thing ever tiresome to have to defend. In a way it’s a small mercy that I didn’t particularly enjoy the rest of this game’s pornography, as it would have been a real shame to have genuine enjoyment spoiled by the inclusion of scenes featuring characters that are visually-indistinguishable from children.

Coming to the subject that a solid majority of the sex scenes in Eclipse Knight Saga involve the subject anime babes being violated against their will by magic tentacle suits, caterpillars, goblins, fish, molluscs, plants, fungi, building-sized mounds of flesh, and so forth…well, I suppose this is the problem with building your game’s sexual content around a too-narrow vision of what you think is hot. It gets boring! It IS boring! Sexual assault at the hands of monsters is so commonplace in Eclipse Knight Saga that it’s treated more as a nuisance on the level of, say, ragweed, rather than an epidemic of profound violence. The constant rapes of our cast of anime babes never carry any kind of permanent consequence, either – rape is one of the profoundly violating, life-changing experiences a person can be made to suffer, but Eclipse Knight Saga‘s anime babes will shrug off hours of horrific abuse at the hands of Sex Spiders or whatever with the same casual indifference that you or I might employ to describe an extra-long line at a food truck on a hot day. Bellies are distended with gallons of monster cum, wombs are inverted, assholes are crammed full of eggs, none of it matters or causes any kind of long-term complications. I presume the lack of consequences is in aid of maintaining a light, intentionally-comedic tone, but it’s a poor mix for me (a mix made no more palatable by the fact that Eclipse Knight Saga‘s attempts at humor are often as inept as its other half-baked aspects). Like so many other things, this just doesn’t work for me.

The End

Eclipse Knight Saga is not, as far as I’m able to tell, an unsuccessful game, having more than six thousand positive ratings on DLSite with over eighteen thousand units purchased (making it a solidly-performing title among Tsukinomizu Project’s offerings on that site). It clearly found its audience, and I wish said audience all the joy of the game. As I said above, I struggle to envision the kind of person who might be persuaded to join that audience, because this person would need to be:

• Indifferent about needing to play 60 hours of a fairly mediocre JRPG in order to access all of the game’s sexual content (or be so inexperienced with JRPGs as to not recognize its mediocrity)
• Comfortable-to-enthusiastic about depictions of cartoon bestiality
• Comfortable-to-enthusiastic about depictions of childlike characters having sex
• Comfortable-to-enthusiastic about depictions of childlike characters subjected to cartoon bestiality
• Comfortable-to-enthusiastic about high volumes of depictions of cartoonish rape
• A fan, somehow, of a pretty lifeless and unsexy anime art style
• Unbothered by some of the worst sex sound effects I’ve ever suffered through

If that sounds like you, I have good news.

Bigg remains the editor of the Adult Analysis Anthology as well as one half of boutique adult game studio BP Games. He has worked as a designer, writer, and programmer of video games since 2010. His games include the sex-work-focused slice-of-life Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story and the monsterfucking isekai sandbox Monstrous Liberation.

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